Tag Archives: making changes

Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick by Jeremy Dean (Da Capo Lifelong Books, $26.00, 272 pages)

“…habits are both savior and curse.”

Making Habits, Breaking Habits by Jeremy Dean is an interesting collection of 13 article-chapters. Each chapter would make for an engaging airline magazine article, but the whole simply doesn’t deliver on the promise of telling us how to “make any change (in habits) stick.” Most of what Dean tells us is common sense, such as the notion that bad habits lead to depression and good — what he calls happy — habits lead to self-satisfaction and happiness. Naturally, Dean offers the advice of replacing bad habits with happy habits, something much easier said than done; especially as even good habits tend to become boring and less than enjoyable with repetition.

“One reason habits are so hard to change is that we start performing them without conscious deliberation.”

The notion of what constitutes happiness in our lives just about overtakes the topic of human habits, and it’s no accident that Dean often cites Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert. Gilbert wrote the satisfying survey book, Stumbling on Happiness, which for most people would likely make a better choice than Making Habits.

It doesn’t help that Dean’s an Englishman who writes in a style that’s awkward for Americans to read, and poor editing results in words having been left out: “…Twitter, Facebook… and the rest reward us with little bits information…”.